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Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of
cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the
concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968,
the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal
manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its
relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The
essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the
multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late
Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally
coded social spaces can be described and understood historically
without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the
definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or
homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism
today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding
multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of
politically exploited concepts of social spaces.
Multiculturalism has long been linked to calls for tolerance of
cultural diversity, but today many observers are subjecting the
concept to close scrutiny. After the political upheavals of 1968,
the commitment to multiculturalism was perceived as a liberal
manifesto, but in the post-9/11 era, it is under attack for its
relativizing, particularist, and essentializing implications. The
essays in this collection offer a nuanced analysis of the
multifaceted cultural experience of Central Europe under the late
Habsburg monarchy and beyond. The authors examine how culturally
coded social spaces can be described and understood historically
without adopting categories formerly employed to justify the
definition and separation of groups into nations, ethnicities, or
homogeneous cultures. As we consider the issues of multiculturalism
today, this volume offers new approaches to understanding
multiculturalism in Central Europe freed of the effects of
politically exploited concepts of social spaces.
The period of the baroque (late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth
centuries) saw extensive reconfiguration of European cities and
their public spaces. Yet, this transformation cannot be limited
merely to signifying a style of art, architecture, and decor.
Rather, the dynamism, emotionality, and potential for grandeur that
were inherent in the baroque style developed in close interaction
with the need and desire of post-Reformation Europeans to find
visual expression for the new political, confessional, and societal
realities. Highly illustrated, this volume examines these complex
interrelationships among architecture and art, power, religion, and
society from a wide range of viewpoints and localities. From Krakow
to Madrid and from Naples to Dresden, cities were reconfigured
visually as well as politically and socially. Power, in both its
political and architectural guises, had to be negotiated among
constituents ranging from monarchs and high churchmen to ordinary
citizens. Within this process, both rulers and ruled were
transformed: Europe left behind the last vestiges of the medieval
and arrived on the threshold of the modern.
With the enlargement of the European Union, the accession countries
are coming under pressure to develop and meet EU standards for
environmental protection and sustainable development. In this
ongoing process, global economic liberalization, regulatory policy,
conservation, and lifestyle issues are all involved, and creative
solutions will have to be found. Historians, geographers,
economists, ecologists, business management experts, public policy
specialists, and community organizers have come together in this
volume and examine, for the first time, environmental issues
ranging from national and regional policy and macroeconomics to
local studies in community regeneration. The evidence suggests
that, far from being mere passive recipients of instruction and
assistance from outside, the people of Central and East Central
Europe have been engaged actively in working out solutions to these
problems. Several promising cases illustrate opportunities to
overcome crisis situations and offer examples of good practices,
while others pose warnings. The experiences of these countries in
wrestling with issues of sustainability continue to be of
importance to policy development within the EU and may serve also
as examples for both developed and developing countries worldwide.
Zbigniew Bochniarz, is affiliated to the Evans School of Public
Affairs at the University of Washington in Seattle. He spent over
twenty years at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute
where he founded a Center for Nations in Transition. The Center
became an international leader in delivering foreign assistance for
Central and Eastern Europe. His work focuses on economic,
environmental, and social aspects of sustainability of transforming
economies. He is the author, co-author and/or editor of over 100
publications. Gary B. Cohen, has been director of the Center for
Austrian Studies and professor of history at the University of
Minnesota, Twin Cities, since 2001. He teaches and publishes on
modern Central European social and political history. He is the
author of numerous articles and essays as well as two books, The
Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861-1914 (first
edition, Princeton Univ. Press,1981; rev. 2nd ed., Purdue Univ.
Press, 2005) and Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial
Austria, 1848-1918 (Purdue Univ. Press, 1996).
In Europe and around the world, social policies and welfare
services have faced increasing pressure in recent years as a result
of political, economic, and social changes. Just as Europe was a
leader in the development of the welfare state and the supportive
structures of corporatist politics from the 1920s onward, Europe in
particular has experienced stresses from globalization and striking
innovation in welfare policies. While debates in the United
Kingdom, Germany, and France often attract wide international
attention, smaller European countries-Belgium, Denmark, Austria, or
Finland-are often overlooked. This volume seeks to correct this
unfortunate oversight as these smaller countries serve as models
for reform, undertaking experiments that only later gain the
attention of stymied reformers in the larger countries.
Early modern Central Europe was the continent's most decentralized
region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally.
With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe's most
religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in
terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman
Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines
the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in
Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of
tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a
facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region's
Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities.
The development of religious toleration-one of the most debated
questions of the early modern period-is examined here afresh, with
careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to
both confessional concord and religious violence.
With the enlargement of the European Union, the accession countries
are coming under pressure to develop and meet EU standards for
environmental protection and sustainable development. In this
ongoing process, global economic liberalization, regulatory policy,
conservation, and lifestyle issues are all involved, and creative
solutions will have to be found. Historians, geographers,
economists, ecologists, business management experts, public policy
specialists, and community organizers have come together in this
volume and examine, for the first time, environmental issues
ranging from national and regional policy and macroeconomics to
local studies in community regeneration. The evidence suggests
that, far from being mere passive recipients of instruction and
assistance from outside, the people of Central and East Central
Europe have been engaged actively in working out solutions to these
problems. Several promising cases illustrate opportunities to
overcome crisis situations and offer examples of good practices,
while others pose warnings. The experiences of these countries in
wrestling with issues of sustainability continue to be of
importance to policy development within the EU and may serve also
as examples for both developed and developing countries worldwide.
The German-speaking inhabitants of the Bohemian capital developed a
group identification and defined themselves as a minority as they
dealt with growing Czech political and economic strength in the
city and with their own sharp numerical decline: in the 1910 census
only seven percent of the metropolitan population claimed that they
spoke primarily German. The study uses census returns, extensive
police and bureaucratic records, newspaper accounts, and memoirs on
local social and political life to show how the German minority and
the Czech majority developed demographically and economically in
relation to each other and created separate social and political
lives for their group members. The study carefully traces the roles
of occupation, class, religion, and political ideology in the
formation of German group loyalties and social solidarities.
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